Since the famous mid-20th century experiments on “operant conditioning” by BF Skinner, people have been tempted to describe modern humans as a “rats in cages”, forever pressing levers for tiny pellets of pleasure. Before that, however, the dominant metaphor involved a different rodent. In the 19th century, caged squirrels were popular pets, getting their exercise from running on wheels. “The tendency of the entire national energy,” John Ruskin wrote, “is to approximate more and more the state of a squirrel in a cage.”
The Victorians, indeed, were initially just as fond of the grey squirrel as of the indigenous red. American grey squirrels were first brought to Britain in 1876 by a Victorian banker called Thomas V Brocklehurst, and soon became a fashionable import. But by 1912 they had become the dominant squirrel in Regent’s Park, London, and so began the long backlash, which rumbles on to this day. As Peter Coates’s splendidly rich book demonstrates in deep cultural detail, the long “squirrel wars” of 20th-century Britain are a microcosm of wider arguments about biological belonging and what he nicely terms “the emotional ecology of home”.
The country diarist for this newspaper, then known as the Manchester Guardian, spoke darkly in 1931 of the grey squirrel hordes threatening to “overrun the country” in tones that would now excite Suella Braverman. The success of the greys, he thought, was a lamentable example of the general “Americanisation” of Britain. It was long alleged, with no direct evidence, that greys killed reds. In fact they just enjoyed a more robust constitution and could digest more kinds of food, but rhetoric of the “grey peril” was irresistible. During the second world war, children’s stories even portrayed grey squirrels as foreigners seizing their lebensraum by force.
One official solution was to eat them, fried, casseroled, or curried. The taste was “a cross between rabbit and hare”. A government poster of 1955 urged patriotic Brits to “Destroy the Grey Squirrel”, offering free shotgun cartridges and a bounty on tails. Harold Macmillan was particularly exercised about grey squirrels, firing off memoranda demanding to know what was being done about them.
At the same time, as Coates shows, the red squirrel was gradually sanctified and iconicised on postage stamps and other official communications, a “plucky underdog” that needed our help. (Coates points out that the squirrels now called “red” were never called red before the arrival of the greys; instead the native “common squirrel” was most often thought of as brown.) Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin was held up as both cause and example of the love of the indigenous breed (though the eponymous hero is, as Coates notes, extremely annoying). And yet the prevailing attitude to even red squirrels well into the 1920s and 30s – the sentimentality of Victorian pet-owning townies notwithstanding – had been that they were pestiferous “tree rats”, ravagers of songbird eggs and destroyers of saplings.
The grey squirrel was anyway hardly an “invasive species”, in the militaristic language of some ecologists to this day, but a trafficked species: it was introduced to Britain deliberately and repeatedly. Some people still dream, however, of saving the red squirrel by personally killing as many greys as possible, perhaps in part because they have simply forgotten the story of Canute and the tide – the tide being, in this case, competition for resources and ecosystem change. One English Nature panjandrum is here quoted as calling grey squirrels “horrible things”; another “conservation biologist”, about to smash in the skull of a grey, declares: “They don’t belong here.”
But it’s too late for even the most energetic programme of sciurine ethnic cleansing to succeed, and global populations of red squirrels are not in any danger at all. From this perspective, Coates concludes reasonably, the proportion of squirrel colours in Britain is irrelevant, and “killing for conservation” seems a bit nutty. He concludes, liberally, that the grey squirrel, having been here for nearly 150 years, should be accepted and celebrated as a British animal. But nostalgia for an imaginary bucolic past – an old-England Arcadia in which people loved squirrels rather than thinking of them all as common vermin – is a powerful drug.
• Squirrel Nation: Reds, Greys and the Meaning of Home by Peter Coates is published by Reaktion (£15.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
